1. Absolute Alice
Black Issues Book Review
March 1, 2003 | Porter, Evette
Feminist-writer-poet-activist and literary high priestess Mice Walker returns to form with
a collection of poems about war, falling bodies, the ancestors, trees and everything
holistic here on Earth.
On my bookshelf, I have an old dogeared copy of In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
that over the years has become my favorite Alice Walker book. Actually, the copy
belonged to my sister who gave it to my mother. But its history is irrelevant since I now
possess the book, and therefore consider it my own. For reasons that are complicated
and have mostly to do with my own creative ambition, Our Mothers' Gardens resonates
for me much like Women Who Run With the Wolves does for other feminist writers. It
fosters a certain boldness, as well as a measure of comfort and understanding for those
who struggle with self-doubt in their writing.
The first essay in Our Mothers' Gardens is entitled "Saving the Life That Is Your Own:
The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life." I read it some years ago in an effort to
find my own voice as a writer. But what was most revealing about the essay is that I
never imagined such a supremely confident writer as Alice Walker would ever need a
model in her writing. After all, having coined the term womanist, it seemed incredible
that Walker would look for wisdom in someone else. And yet it is her confidence and her
apparent vulnerability that make her such a contradiction.
2. At 59, Alice Walker is one of only a few writers who has enjoyed critical and popular
success, albeit not without controversy. Her latest book, a collection of poetry entitled
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, includes works that are as literal as "Poem
for Aneta Chapman on Her 33rd Birthday"; to seemingly pedestrian observations such
as in "May 23, 1999"; to a series of poems that contemplate 9/11 and anticipate an
increasingly hawkish climate in the U.S. While not likely to elicit as incendiary a
response as some of her other books, Absolute Trust is no less radical in its ideas.
"In the introduction there is a section about Mari'a Sabina, a curandera [a healer] from
Oaxaca," says Walker. "Her foundation in life is exactly that: absolute trust in the
goodness of the earth," she says in a voice that's surprisingly soft. "Her foundation is
actually my own, which is why I chose it. I also have absolute trust in the goodness of
the earth. And I think that is my religion, to the extent that I have one," she adds. "I
believe that what the earth produces, what the earth is, is good, and deserves our
respect and adoration."
It is this decidedly more spiritual philosophy that Walker has expressed in her writing in
recent years. And perhaps the best example of that philosophy and Walker's sometimes
unconventionally temporal narrative is her novel The Temple of My Familiar, which the
book jacket describes as "a romance of the last 500,000 years." The book is her
favorite, says Walker. "It is more true to the way I live in the world," she says. "It is more
contemporary to me. Even though it covers so much ancient history, it is still more the
way that I have lived in the world, which is to be connected to many cultures, and many
different kinds of people."
Throughout her life, Walker has always seemed something of a shaman -- a wanderlust
seeking higher consciousness, which at times has earned her both ridicule and
celebrity. Though she received recognition early in her career, by and large she has
earned somewhat mixed reviews. Critics and readers alike either love her or loathe her;
there is no middle ground with Alice Walker.
3. Born in 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Malsenior was the youngest of Willie Lee and
Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker's eight children, in a family of sharecroppers. When she
was eight, Walker lost her sight in one eye when her older brother accidentally shot her
with a BB gun during a game of cowboys and Indians. It was a scar she bore for years,
even after the disfiguring cataract was removed when she was fourteen. When she was
in high school, says Walker, her mother gave her three important gifts: a sewing
machine that let her make her own clothes; a suitcase, which allowed her to leave home
and travel; and a typewriter, which gave her permission to write.
After graduating from high school as valedictorian, Walker enrolled at Spelman College
in Atlanta in 1961 on a scholarship. Two years later, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence
College in New York, to escape Spelman's "puritanical" atmosphere. It was at Sarah
Lawrence that she wrote what would be her first published poems, Once. Written during
a traumatic period shortly after having had an abortion, Walker's teacher at Sarah
Lawrence, Muriel Rukeyser, herself a poet, gave Alice's poems to her agent, who in turn
showed them to an editor at Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, which published the collection.
After graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, Walker received a writing fellowship and
was making plans to go to Senegal, when her life took a different turn. Instead of going
to West Africa, she flew to Mississippi. "That summer marked the beginning of a
realization that I could never live happily in Africa -- or anywhere else -- until I could live
freely in Mississippi," she wrote. After spending time in Mississippi and Georgia
registering black voters, she returned to New York and worked in the city's welfare
department. In 1967, she married Mel Leventhal, a white civil rights lawyer and activist
who she met while in Mississippi. And in 1969, she gave birth to their daughter,
Rebecca.
During this time, she continued to write; and in 1970, at age 26, Walker published The
Third Life of Grange Copeland, the manuscript of which she completed just days before
giving birth. The novel, which chronicles violence and infidelity over several generations
of a black family, marked an auspicious fiction debut. Two years later, she published In
4. Love and Trouble, a collection of short stories, and a book of poetry entitled
Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, which was nominated for a National Book
Award and won the Lillian Smith Award. In 1976, she published the novel Meridian.
"The first books were written partly as a duty to my ancestors, to my grandparents and
my parents and the ones before that," says Walker. "Meridian doesn't fall into that," she
acknowledges. "That was more because I was living in Mississippi during the Civil
Rights Movement and I wanted to write a novel that looked not just at the politics, but at
the heart of the people. And I wanted to see what the relationships were like between
men and women as they came up against the fascism, and racism, and Nazism of white
supremacy. So since I was a writer and living in the South, it was very natural to write
about what was happening," says Walker, who also taught black studies and creative
writing at Jackson State University and Tougaloo College from 1968 to 1971.
"The thing about my work is that even when it's painful, it's joyful -- because I can do it,"
says Walker. "I grew up in the South in what most people would consider fairly
impoverished circumstances. It wasn't easy to actually be able to go to college and
learn to write, and i did," says Walker.
"I saw a murdered woman when I was thirteen," her tone, sober. "She had been killed
by her husband," she continues, "and I knew that somehow I had to learn -- even as 13-
year-old -- I had to learn how to make sense of this. I had to learn to make people see it
for what it was -- murder. When someone kills you, it is murder," she says adamantly. "I
don't care if they're your husband, your boyfriend or whatever. So the pain of writing
about that 20 years later, or however long it was, was intense. But so was the joy,
because I had looked at her face -- which had been pretty much blown off -- and I had
made a promise to myself, and to her, that one day I would make other people see what
I saw," says Walker, echoing a theme that runs through much of her writing.
In 1978, Alice Walker moved to northern California. Four years later, she published
what is probably her most celebrated work, The Color Purple. Though, at the time,
unusual in its epistolary form, the precedent for Walker's character Celie in The Color
5. Purple can be traced to Janie Crawford, Zora Neale Hurston's heroine in Their Eyes
Were Watching God. Hurston, whose life and work Walker began researching in 1970,
provides the model in Janie Crawford that Alice Walker chose for herself. She writes in
"Saving the Life That Is Your Own":
I love the way Janie Crawford
left her husbands
the one who wanted to change her
into a mule
and the other who tried to interest her
in being a queen.
A woman, unless she submits,
is neither a mule
nor a queen
though like a mule she may suffer
and like a queen pace the floor.
The novel The Color Purple, which takes place from 1900 to the 1940s, tells the story of
Celie, a womanchild, who after years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of
her father and later her husband, finds dignity, independence and kinship in her
relationships with other black women. Told mostly in a series of letters written by Celie
and her sister, Nettie, the novel won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
"Even though I wrote The Color Purple here [in California] -- I actually lived in New York
for a while. I couldn't really write there, because I was an editor at Ms. magazine and
6. that took a lot of time. I had a child, and I was getting divorced, and all that life -- just
life, life, life," she explains.
At the time, Walker decided to move to San Francisco to write, resuming a relationship
with an old friend from her college days at Spelman, Black Scholar editor Robert Allen,
who had attended Morehouse. Almost immediately, the two decided to sell their house
in San Francisco and move to Mendocino, an area in northern California that reminded
Walker of her native Georgia.
"I wrote The Color Purple as a way of communicating with the spirit of black people and
my people -- in celebration. So that pretty much completed the cycle," says Walker of
her early works. "I had written In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women -- those were
mostly black women in the South. And then, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down --
those were women North and South. It was about their spiritual development."
But it was The Color Purple that became a best-seller and caused quite a stir --
especially among black men. Among critics, Walker's book was decried for being overly
harsh in its depiction of the brutality of its black male characters, while she was chided
for being too much a feminist -- or womanist, to use Walker's words. In what was a
generally positive review in The New York Times, black literary critic Mel Watkins cited
the "pallid portraits of the males," as the novel's biggest transgression." Others, like poet
Sonia Sanchez and Ishmael Reed, were far more biting in their criticism.
"I wrote a complete book called The Same River Twice, which is about the [Color
Purple] controversy and my response to it," says Walker. "I wrote it and published it
about ten years after the film The Color Purple." In The Same River Twice, she
describes the sometimes vicious attacks surrounding the release of the movie The
Color Purple, the rejection of her screenplay adaptation of the novel by Steven
Spielberg, her mother's failing health, her own battle with Lyme disease and the
breakup of her relationship with Allen.
7. "In general, I don't seem to care very much about what people think about what I'm
doing," she says, pausing then, quickly adding, "if they don't actually try to physically
harm me." For the most part, Walker seems to have quietly ignored her detractors. "I'm
pretty clear about what I'm supposed to be doing here, and I do that," she says, calmly.
"Their job is to criticize, and they do that. So I feel like, it works out. I write and speak,
and band with people that I feel need me," she continues.
"I got very involved, after that, in the struggle to end genital mutilation and I wrote
Possessing the Secret of Joy. And that was very different from anything I would have
written living in Georgia or Mississippi, because we don't have that there, thank
goodness. So it depends, you know. Then, with By the Light of My Father's Smile, I was
very much interested in showing how important it is for fathers to bless the sexuality of
their daughters. And if they cannot do that, then the daughter cannot bless them by
having confidence in them, and letting them be a part of their lives."
Her writing sometimes mirrors her own life. In a moving collection of short stories
published in 2001, The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, Walker reveals some of
the intimate details of her own life. In a chapter called "Memoir of a Marriage," she
writes: "Beloved, A few days ago I went to see the little house on R. Street where we
were so happy. Before traveling back to Mississippi I had not thought much about it. It
seemed so far away, almost another dimension." Further, in the same chapter, she
continues, "I went back with the woman I love now. She had never been South, never
been to Mississippi, though her grandparents are buried in one of the towns you used to
sue racists in." Like much of Walker's writing, The Way Forward is elliptical. There is an
ambiguity as to whether Walker is writing for the reader, for an intimate, or for herself.
"My job, in a way, is helping people to have that closer look -- whether it's female genital
mutilation, or wife battering, or child abuse," she says. "On the other hand, being able to
love wherever you wish and whoever you want, and seeing that as an expression of the
freedom that we have. My personal life is just like everybody's," she admits, "filled with
my friends, community and events that are pretty much mine."
8. With Absolute Trust, Alice Walker returns to the genre where her literary career began.
While the poems vary widely in subject, they are strongly influenced by the events of
9/11 and embrace a more "outsider" global perspective.
"I don't think there is a limit to what people can say about grief," says Walker. "And I
don't think there's a limit to what one can say about the need to sit ourselves down and
talk about what kind of future we want, if indeed we have one.
"I think all I can say is that now I'm an older person. I'm someone who has had much
more experience than in the beginning. But in some ways, I'm concerned about the
same issues, the same emotions. I'm concerned with the safety of our people, the
planet, people who are in deep trouble around the world," she explains, reflecting on
how her poetry has changed over the years. "I think that with time, we begin to
understand a little better that some things we thought were horrible, unbearable...can be
bearable as we get older. For instance, in my earlier poetry...I wrote poems about
suicide. And now I don't think about that very much. It's interesting because I think that
to wage continuous war in the world is a kind of suicide. In a sense, the suicide that I
see now is a global one. It's humanity that seems to be interested in ending itself. But I
don't feel interested in ending myself. I think that's progress."
Finally, I ask her why she chose to publish Absolute Trust, since she acknowledges in
the preface to the book that in the past two years she had resigned herself not to write
anymore.
"Poetry comes when it wants, and it is not dependent on whether you want to write
poetry or not," says Walker. "I was in Mexico a while ago last year and the poems just
started to come. I think it was partly because they had been accumulating over a
number of years," she says, recalling her first book of poetry. "That's why it's absurd to
say I can give this up," she adds. "Creativity is so powerful that you can't give it up. It
might give you up, but you can't give it up."
Photograph (Alice Walker)
10. nowhere near the political likes of many of his African-American academic
contemporaries. Though Loury's transformation began with One By One From the
Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America in 1995, in this
book he lays claim to ideologies that would have been anathema during his days as the
resident black scholar in ultra-conservative think tanks during the Reagan years. Here
he proposes the idea that "racial stigma" is what plagues African Americans rather than
racial discrimination, effectively thwarting black progress. While that may be true, it is
little consolation given the daily assaults of racial bias.
Loury's real-life story is a classic tale of falling from grace and redemption: conservative,
black, Harvard professor becomes victim to drug addiction, a paternity suit and marital
woes, which eventually force him to resign his position. Ultimately, he finds himself, and
resurrects his career after an evangelical transformation.
Unfortunately, little of that spiritual catharsis comes through in Loury's essays, which
were delivered as part of the W.E.B. DuBois lecture series at Harvard. Perhaps it is his
reliance on the overly rigid language of an economist that constricts his work. He
concludes rather dryly in Anatomy of Racial Inequality, "Discrimination is about how
people are treated; stigma is about who, at the deepest cognitive level, they are
understood to be."
I suspect Glenn Loury's book would resonate if it were more informed by his own
personal experience.
--Evette Porter is the executive editor of BIBR.
Porter, Evette
COPYRIGHT 2007 Cox, Matthews & Associates
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-83553092.html
12. transgressive and outrageous at times. Working in a tradition--the silhouette--that was
popular in the South in the 19th century, Walker manages to artfully manipulate and
subvert the stereotypes of slavery that the medium was historically used to purvey. Her
work is to the original cutout silhouette what Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone is to
Gone With the Wind--and then some. Walker's silhouettes depict blacks in demeaning
and often sexually compromising positions, as well as scenarios where they appear to
be exploited by whites.
In The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995),
three shadowy images of black slave women appear to be simultaneously sucking each
other's breast while an infant sits on the knee of one, his lips just out of reach. In
another series, The Means to an End ... A Shadow Drama in Five Acts (1995), one of
the series' sequences depicts a naked, black girl whose neck is being wrung by her
white master as his leg is positioned between her knees. But while other black artists
have employed stereotypes in debunking racist imagery--Robert Colescott and Michael
Ray Charles, to name two--what has some critics up in arms is that Walker's work
pushes the tropes of slavery to the extreme. It is the unmitigated images of "negative"
stereotypes--blackface if you will--that has led some to label her work as offensive. In
particular, African-American conceptual artist Betye Saar, who called for a boycott of
Kara Walker's work shortly after Walker, who was not yet 30 at the time, received a
MacArthur "genius" award in 1997.
Narratives of a Negress responds to Walker's detractors. In an essay by black cultural
critic Michele Wallace, she observes: "The aptitude for risking something dangerous
and rare in one's creative output as an artist ranks higher than talent, a graceful line, an
acute sense of color and composition, a poetic soul, or a gift for cocktail party gab," she
writes. "Luckily for us ... there are such contrarians and oppositionalists among us who
will always refuse to follow the crowd--black artists and intellectuals willing to brave the
generic disapproval...."
Indeed, Kara Walker is, if anything, an artistic oppositionalist.
15. www.highbeam.com
TERRY MCMILLAN ON HER WORK, HER LOVE AND
HER CHARACTERS
The Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY)
June 3, 1996 | EVETTE PORTER - Universal Press Syndicate
The thing to remember about Terry McMillan is that she's very much a diva, and not just
by reputation. With her high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, she actually looks
the part, even if she seems somewhat younger than her 44 years and is smaller than I'd
expected. Her voice is deep, mature and sounds slightly edgy as she explains she has
just finished doing 19 interviews.
She became a phenomenon after the success of "Waiting to Exhale," both as a book
and a movie, and earned a $6 million advance for her latest novel, "How Stella Got Her
Groove Back." It's a breathless tale of a middle-age woman who falls for a 20-year-old
while vacationing in Jamaica, and much has been written about the similarities between
the novel and Ms. McMillan's real life -- which includes a young Jamaican boyfriend she
met on the island last summer.
"How long is this gonna take?" she asks, after giving me the once-over. I'd heard about
her abrasiveness, but when I say an hour, she says OK, and politely ushers me into her
hotel suite.
16. Not long after we sit down, Jonathan Plummer, the "souvenir" whom Time magazine
says Ms. McMillan brought back from her trip last year, pokes his head out from the
adjoining room. For all the speculation about Plummer being the love interest in Ms.
McMillan's latest novel, he bears little resemblance to Stella's tropical boy toy.
This seems like as good an opening as any to start talking about the personal issues in
Ms. McMillan's work.
People assume your work is autobiographical, that Terry McMillan is Stella. Is she?
"Stella isn't a reinvention of myself. She's only part of my persona. I can't believe people
actually think my life is like that. What I give my characters are my concerns, which for
the most part are grounded in reality."
Are you the person that you see written about?
"Pretty much, with the exception of Time magazine. The writer had a chip on his
shoulder from the first line."
More has been written about you than about your work.
"Thank you. That was my point."
Why?
"I think the film may have had something to do with it, and I understand that. But
especially with Stella, everybody wants to know how much of it is real. How much of it is
true. If I said, 'All of it,' what does that mean? People spend a lot of time trying to draw
similarities between my life and my work. I've gotten it with every book. 'Which character
is you in "Waiting to Exhale," girl?' Do you think if I was Robin, the sexually promiscuous
character, that I would admit it? I mean, come on -- dingbat that she was. I don't think
so!"
17. Sure, but some of the characters in your novels bear a strong resemblance to you, so
maybe that has something to do with it?
"Probably. But in 'Waiting to Exhale,' out of all the things those women went through,
only two of those experiences came close to what I've been through. And even those
were lies. But the bottom line is, as a writer I understand, or I'm trying to understand,
what makes people tick. I try to make the characters believable, realistic. I think when
people meet me, they're more comfortable assuming that I'm one of these characters
because then it makes me not this icon, this larger-than-life figure. I think that's one of
the reasons fans do it." For all the media's winking about excessive self-disclosure, Ms.
McMillan has yet to write about some of the more difficult things in her life -- the deaths
in recent years of one of her closest friends and her mother. Even as "Exhale" was
rising to the top of the charts, she was abandoning "A Day Late and a Dollar Short," a
tale about a mother and daughter. Ms. McMillan's new novel, written in just a month,
marked an end to her writer's block.
Was writing "Stella" therapeutic?
"Of course. Definitely. Cathartic."
In a way that "A Day Late and a Dollar Short" was not?
"No, no. You can't compare the two. I don't do that."
Because it was about your mother, right?
"No! No! Nope. Not about my mother. It's about a woman who's in her 50s who in some
ways has a part of my mother's persona, but she's not my mother. I had my mother in
mind. I just wanted to explore that and I thought about some of the things my mother
had said to me and my sisters over the years and that's how it started. But once I lost
my mother, it was too close -- the idea of writing about a mother who is a little bit too
intrusive and invasive in her adult children's lives, I couldn't go there emotionally. I didn't
want to.
18. "Stella was different. I embraced that. I hadn't intended to write it. It dictated to me that it
wanted to be written and I just sort of paid attention. I hadn't written in almost two years.
So when it started coming out, I just gave in to it. I just sort of succumbed, surrendered.
And I was not going to stop. I didn't really think it was a novel I was writing. At first it was
a poem. Then a little short story."
So what about being involved with a much younger man?
"I think as women we almost inherently question anything that makes us happy. I don't
think I thought about it very long. But if you had told me a year ago that I'd be going out
with someone in their 20s, I would have laughed in your face. I would've said, 'I don't go
out with children.' Really. I'd never even thought about it."
Part of the attraction, she admits, is that Plummer didn't know who she was. "He'd never
even heard of my book, which was great," she chuckles. "Plus I didn't really care at the
time, to be honest. Because I wasn't really thinking that way. All I was thinking was what
a good-looking young man he was and one day somebody was going to be verrry
happy. I don't think it's so much robbing the cradle, it's more like the way interracial
couples were years ago."
So far, she has no regrets.
"Life is really short, too short. My girlfriend wasn't even 50 and my mother was 59 when
she died. I was thinking, shoot, if I blink, I'll be 59. And I don't want to be one of these
wish I coulda, woulda, shoulda. Right now it's been almost a year with Jonathan. And
it's been a good year. And if it's over next month, I'll be heartbroken. But the bottom line
is it's been a good year, a damn good year. That's why I wrote the book, so I wouldn't
forget it."
In interviews and even in your novels, you've become somewhat notorious for --
"Being so profane?" Ms. McMillan asks, slightly bemused. "Oh, I can be when you tick
me off. When I was being interviewed by the reporter from Time, she was being really
20. www.highbeam.com
Separate, But Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of
Henry Clay Anderson
Black Issues Book Review
January 1, 2003 | Porter, Evette
with essays by Shawn Wilson, Clifton L Taulbert and Mary Panzer
Public Affairs, October 2002, $35.00, ISBN 1-586-48092-8
If you're old enough to remember the Deep South during segregation, then the
photographs in Separate, But Equal will seem eerily familiar. They offer a glimpse of
southern life for blacks that was mostly defined by the absence of whites. It was a world
where civil rights marchers shared the same stage with cheerleaders, the high school
prom, Little League, the women's auxiliary and traveling vaudeville shows. For me,
having long ago lived in Mississippi during segregation, it was like coming home.
Among the more than 90 black-and-white images taken by Henry Clay (H.C.) Anderson
of life in the Mississippi Delta from the late 1940s to the mid-'60s, there is a sense of
black social life that seamlessly crosses class lines. Anderson, who opened up shop in
1948, photographed everyday life in the segregated world of Greenville, Mississippi. His
stock-in-trade, however, was high school yearbook photos, portraits of college campus
22. Writing Home
Black Issues Book Review
May 1, 2002 | Porter, Evette
Every writer has a place they call home. For James Baldwin, it was Harlem. For Zora
Neale Hurston, it was Eatonville, Florida. Whether consciously or intuitively, that sense
of place invariably creeps into an author's writing. Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins' novels
are set in Los Angeles -- the city where he grew up -- replete with familiar landmarks
and references that native Angelenos easily recognize. For Colson Whitehead, author
of John Henry Days and his first novel, The Intuitionist, home is New York City.
Born in Manhattan, the 32-year-old Whitehead has lived all over the city. "We were a
family of renters," he says of his childhood. "Every three years, depending on fortune
and how many kids were in the house, we'd move up and down Manhattan. I was born
on 139th [Street] and Riverside, and we lived there until I was in kindergarten," he
recalls. "Then we moved a couple of times, until finally in high school, I ended up on
101st and West End Avenue. All of these different neighborhoods -- the East Side, the
Upper West Side, Harlem -- they've left their mark on me."
For the past eight years though, Whitehead has lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a
neighborhood that has recently undergone the kind of demographic changes that
gentrification engenders. Although the house he lives in with his wife, Natasha, has the
hardscrabble look of a clapboard row house in need of a little paint, it possesses the
23. kind of charm that reflects the optimism of the neighborhood, easily fitting in with the
trendy restaurants a couple of blocks away and the bodegas around the corner.
"I'm definitely a New Yorker," says Whitehead. "I've tried living other places, but I
always end up coming back here. It's always nice to walk around the neighborhood and
say, `Oh yeah, that's the cramped apartment where I wrote The Intuitionist. Or that's
757 Fulton where I wrote half of John Henry,'" he says. "All of these places have an
additional layer of meaning for me, because where I write is so tied to the book -- the
memory of writing in certain rooms, on certain tables."
In The Intuitionist, a novel about a black elevator inspector Lila Mae Watson, the story
takes place amid the kind of urban architecture -- skyscrapers and congested spaces --
much like Manhattan. "I was broke and living in a really small place," says Whitehead,
describing the period when he was writing the novel. "I think that's why Lila Mae
Watson, in The Intuitionist, ends up in a series of very tiny rooms," he says.
"I always try and put some Brooklyn names in my book," he adds. "The big elevator
inspector, who is a theorist and an Intuitionist, is named Fulton, and that's because I
wrote the book on Fulton Street. Every time I'd look out the window, it would enter the
book."
In John Henry Days, Whitehead takes the story of the familiar black folk hero John
Henry, who prevails in a contest against a steam drill and afterward dies of exhaustion,
and turns it into a metaphor about the "Machine Age" versus the "Information Age." In
the novel, a young black freelance journalist from New York named J. Sutter heads to
West Virginia on a junket to cover a backwater media event called "John Henry Days," a
festival celebrating a new postage stamp in honor of the famous steel-driver.
"There's an encounter that J. Sutter has with this crackhead that was drawn from my
own experience with a pretty well-known crackhead in the neighborhood," says
Whitehead. In real life, he says, the guy was arrested and offered the choice of going to
jail or entering rehab. "He entered rehab, and now he has a job reconditioning these
![At 59, Alice Walker is one of only a few writers who has enjoyed critical and popular
success, albeit not without controversy. Her latest book, a collection of poetry entitled
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, includes works that are as literal as "Poem
for Aneta Chapman on Her 33rd Birthday"; to seemingly pedestrian observations such
as in "May 23, 1999"; to a series of poems that contemplate 9/11 and anticipate an
increasingly hawkish climate in the U.S. While not likely to elicit as incendiary a
response as some of her other books, Absolute Trust is no less radical in its ideas.
"In the introduction there is a section about Mari'a Sabina, a curandera [a healer] from
Oaxaca," says Walker. "Her foundation in life is exactly that: absolute trust in the
goodness of the earth," she says in a voice that's surprisingly soft. "Her foundation is
actually my own, which is why I chose it. I also have absolute trust in the goodness of
the earth. And I think that is my religion, to the extent that I have one," she adds. "I
believe that what the earth produces, what the earth is, is good, and deserves our
respect and adoration."
It is this decidedly more spiritual philosophy that Walker has expressed in her writing in
recent years. And perhaps the best example of that philosophy and Walker's sometimes
unconventionally temporal narrative is her novel The Temple of My Familiar, which the
book jacket describes as "a romance of the last 500,000 years." The book is her
favorite, says Walker. "It is more true to the way I live in the world," she says. "It is more
contemporary to me. Even though it covers so much ancient history, it is still more the
way that I have lived in the world, which is to be connected to many cultures, and many
different kinds of people."
Throughout her life, Walker has always seemed something of a shaman -- a wanderlust
seeking higher consciousness, which at times has earned her both ridicule and
celebrity. Though she received recognition early in her career, by and large she has
earned somewhat mixed reviews. Critics and readers alike either love her or loathe her;
there is no middle ground with Alice Walker.](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)